The following is a guest post by Paul Smith, director of the British Council’s U.S. office and a cultural counselor at the British Embassy in Washington. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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The following is a guest post by Paul Smith, director of the British Council’s U.S. office and a cultural counselor at the British Embassy in Washington. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Recent stories about a new hope kindling in Burmese colleges and universities are a timely reminder that the restitution of robust higher education is critical to the security and prosperity for a nation emerging from a fractured past and into a more democratic future.
Fourteen years ago, I spent a year in Myanmar (also known as Burma), where I experienced firsthand the desperate thirst for knowledge.
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At the time, the British Council-Rangoon ran the only public library in the country permitted to stock foreign books. In fact, ours were the only published materials that had been allowed to be imported into the country since 1962. The reason why the State Law and Order Restoration Council, or SLORC, which ran the country, had allowed this was to give the sons and daughters of its members access to materials to study for British International General Certificate of Secondary Education exams. Their intent was on successful application to Western universities.
There were some other helpful SLORC benevolences towards the library. For instance, with enlightened agreement from its U.K. publisher, we would photocopy and distribute to Burmese surgeons and physicians multiple issues of the indispensable surgical journal The Lancet, using the British Council library’s only copy.
In addition to the students and young professionals who frequented the library, it had some extraordinarily eminent members, even if they would necessarily, in the late 1980s, pass for “remote” users. On my first day in the office I found a videocassette with a Post-it note that read, “Do you have any ‘Life on Earth’? – S.” Even Aung San Suu Kyi, from house arrest, was allowed to reach out and borrow from the library, though this anomalous privilege was removed just a couple of weeks later. Her pursuit of the BBC’s natural-history series resonated with sad ironies of captivity and isolation.
Our attempts at that time to generate some elements of academic exchange proved futile. We were not permitted to make direct contact with university officials or set foot on the Rangoon University campus. But we did tentatively work toward inviting Rangoon’s dean of Buddhist studies, a world expert on ancient Burmese texts, to spend a sabbatical term at the British Library in London working on translation and analysis of specialist holdings.
After much effort, we were eventually permitted by the SLORC officially to submit an application for an unnamed but clearly described Burmese specialist to undertake a fully financed London visit to carry out academically defined tasks on specific ancient and medieval documents. We completed the reams of official application forms for the authorities to identify an appropriate nominee to undertake this uniquely charged work and to consider nomination. It took five months but nominate they did—sadly not the expected eminent dean but the 17-year-old daughter of a SLORC general who was seeking the opportunity of a British trip to take in some pop-music festivals.
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Since leaving Burma, I have worked in Afghanistan and the Middle East, where I witnessed a similar desire for access to education. It is a reminder that many emerging nations yearn for the opportunity to establish an authentic and vibrant university system that can realize the will of the people to take command of their own cultural destiny and socioeconomic future. Burma’s flourishing of determination and hope is not so different from that on the campuses in Kabul, Cairo, Damascus, and Tripoli. And with continued Western assistance, such goals can be achieved.